The Constitution of Agency Statutory Interpretation

Transcription

1 College of William & Mary Law School William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty and Deans 2016 The Constitution of Agency Statutory Interpretation Evan J. Criddle William & Mary Law School, Repository Citation Criddle, Evan J., "The Constitution of Agency Statutory Interpretation" (2016). Faculty Publications Copyright c 2016 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository.

2 RESPONSE The Constitution of Agency Statutory Interpretation Evan J. Criddle* INTRODUCTION Within the field of federal statutory interpretation, there is a zone where courts refuse to tread. As the Supreme Court famously explained in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 1 courts will not second-guess a federal administrative agency s reasonable interpretation of a statute it administers when it is apparent from the agency s generally conferred authority and other statutory circumstances that Congress would expect the agency to be able to speak with the force of law when it addresses ambiguity in the statute or fills a space in the enacted law. 2 Chevron deference thus carves out a space 3 within which agencies may interpret statutes as they think best even changing their interpretations over time without fear of judicial interference as long as they provide a reasoned justification and comply with applicable procedural requirements. 4 Some legal scholars have argued that Chevron deference charts the boundary between law and policy. 5 Their argument can be * Cabell Research Professor of Law, William & Mary Law School. The author expresses sincere appreciation to Professor Aaron Saiger and editors at the Vanderbilt Law Review for the invitation to contribute this Essay, and to Aaron Bruhl, Hannah Frank, and Glen Staszewski for helpful comments and conversations that informed this work. Any errors and omissions are, of course, my responsibility alone U.S. 837 (1984). 2. United States v. Mead Corp., 533 U.S. 218, 229 (2001) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). 3. Peter L. Strauss, Deference Is Too Confusing Let s Call Them Chevron Space and Skidmore Weight, 112 COLUM. L. REV (2012). 4. See Nat l Cable & Telecomms. Ass n v. Brand X Internet Servs., 545 U.S. 967, 982 (2005). 5. See, e.g., Michael Herz, Deference Running Riot: Separating Interpretation and Lawmaking Under Chevron, 6 ADMIN L.J. AM. U. 187 (1992); Richard J. Pierce, Jr., How Agencies 325

3 326 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 summarized roughly as follows: when a statute s text is amenable to multiple readings (Chevron step one) and each of those readings is objectively reasonable (Chevron step two), a court has effectively exhausted the resources of legal analysis. From that point forward, the choice between reasonable statutory interpretations turns on extralegal policy considerations that fall outside the heartland of judicial expertise. Rather than answer such questions through independent judgment, courts wisely defer to the agency that administers the statute, recognizing that the executive branch is usually in a better position to decide controversial questions of regulatory policy for a host of reasons such as expertise, political accountability, and congressional expectations. 6 According to this view, Chevron deference empowers a federal agency to exploit statutory ambiguities and gaps in order to promote its own independent policy preferences and the incumbent administration s political agenda. 7 Not everyone accepts this reading of Chevron. In an article published recently in the Vanderbilt Law Review, Professor Aaron Saiger argues that Chevron does not, in fact, give agencies a blank check to adopt any reasonable statutory interpretation. 8 According to Professor Saiger, when a federal agency engages in statutory interpretation, its ethical duties parallel those of the judge in a case where no deference is offered. 9 The agency therefore bears an ethical obligation to draw on available interpretive tools to reach the best account it can of what a statute means 10 rather than chase any policy [it] can reasonably square with the statute. 11 This obligation to seek the best interpretation of a statute applies with full force, he argues, Should Give Meaning to the Statutes They Administer: A Response to Mashaw and Strauss, 59 ADMIN. L. REV. 197, 200 (2007); Mark Seidenfeld, Chevron s Foundation, 86 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 273 (2011); Laurence H. Silberman, Chevron The Intersection of Law & Policy, 58 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 821, (1990). 6. See, e.g., Seidenfeld, supra note 5, at 289 (arguing that Chevron deference is based on a policy-interference avoidance principle whereby courts refrain from second guessing a decision by a political branch when doing so will require the court to rely heavily on policy rather than law). 7. See Michigan v. EPA, 135 S. Ct. 2699, 2713 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring) (asserting that when an agency chooses between reasonable statutory interpretations under Chevron, its task is not to find the best meaning of the text, but to formulate legally binding rules to fill in gaps based on policy judgments made by the agency rather than Congress ); Adrian Vermeule, Our Schmittian Administrative Law, 122 HARV. L. REV. 1095, 1131 (2009) (suggesting that the openended character of Chevron steps one and two creates proven scope for various ideological influences in Chevron s application ). 8. Aaron Saiger, Agencies Obligation to Interpret the Statute, 69 VAND. L. REV (2016). 9. Id. at Id. 11. Id. at 1237.

4 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 327 even when Chevron prevents courts from testing the interpretation through judicial review. 12 Professor Saiger deserves praise for challenging the conventional wisdom that federal agencies are free to pursue their own policy preferences when operating within Chevron s zone of discretion. In this invited Response Essay, I endorse Professor Saiger s central thesis while proposing some friendly amendments that are intended to fortify his argument. Although I agree that federal agencies are subject to norms that constrain their choice of statutory interpretations within Chevron s zone of discretion, I suggest that these norms should be characterized slightly differently, and I propose a more fully developed account of the legal basis for these obligations. 13 Professor Saiger claims that an agency s obligation to seek the best interpretation 14 of statutory provisions derives from (1) the idea that agencies are pure creatures of their statutes without independent policymaking authority and (2) the principle of legislative supremacy, which subordinates agency policymaking to statutory directives. 15 In contrast, I argue that an agency s obligation to set aside its own independent policy preferences in favor of legislative policy judgments rests primarily on a different legal foundation: the constitutional requirement that Congress must supply an authoritative intelligible principle to guide agency discretion whenever it entrusts lawmaking authority to an agency. 16 Because the nondelegation doctrine prohibits Congress from empowering a federal agency to make law without supplying an intelligible principle to channel agency discretion, an 12. See id. at (analogizing agency discretion to prosecutorial discretion, which is regulated by ethical norms). 13. Professor Saiger appears to embrace the idea that an agency s obligation to choose the best interpretation has a legal dimension, see id. at 1232 (characterizing the requirement to select the best interpretation of its governing statute as both a legal and ethical duty ), but he frames his article primarily as an inquiry into the ethics of statutory interpretation, see id. at 1237 ( This Article is about [the] morals [of statutory interpretation]. ), 1240 ( This Article... is concerned with... government ethics namely obligations that actors... have in connection with the execution of their public duties. ). Agencies bear ethical obligations of faithful interpretation, he argues, because an agency s role-oriented authority is akin to that of an agency lawyer who, in the words of Geoffrey Miller, acts unethically when she substitutes her individual moral judgment for that of a political process which is generally accepted as legitimate. Id. at 1244 (quoting Geoffrey P. Miller, Government Lawyers Ethics in a System of Checks and Balances, 54 U. CHI. L. REV. 1293, 1337 (1987)). Although I have some quibbles with the framing of his ethical argument, including his characterization of my own previous writings on the fiduciary character of administrative law as ethical analysis, id. at 1244, for purposes of this brief Response Essay I will focus exclusively on explaining the possible legal basis for the obligations he proposes. 14. Id. at Id. at Whitman v. Am. Trucking Ass ns, 531 U.S. 457 (2001); Yakus v. United States, 321 U.S. 414, 426 (1944).

5 328 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 agency bears a corresponding constitutional obligation to conduct statutory interpretation in a manner that focuses on faithfully following this legislative guidance rather than pursuing its own independent policy preferences. 17 This constitutional obligation of fidelity to an agency s statutory mandate is a legal conduct rule that regulates agency statutory interpretation even when Chevron s deferential decision rules limit judicial review. 18 Consequently, federal agencies lack authority under the Constitution to treat Chevron deference as a license to advance policy agendas that are unmoored from relevant legislative guidance and constitutional norms. The remainder of this Essay is divided into two parts. Part I assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Professor Saiger s critique and explains why further attention to the Constitution s intelligible principle requirement is necessary to explain why agencies may not fill statutory gaps with their own independent policy preferences. Part II problematizes Professor Saiger s effort to distinguish statutory interpretation from policymaking by calling attention to the important conceptual distinction between statutory interpretation (which seeks to recover semantic meaning) and statutory construction (which seeks to distill a statute s legal meaning by applying relevant legal norms). I argue that statutory construction occupies a space between interpretation and policymaking, because it enlists agencies as collaborators with Congress in the dynamic authorship of a regulatory regime. Yet, regardless of whether an agency engages in interpretation or construction, it is never permitted to bypass constitutional and statutory norms in favor of its own independent policy preferences. Even when Chevron calls for judicial deference, the constitutional foundations of agency statutory interpretation dictate that federal agencies, as public fiduciaries, 19 are legally obligated to use their best judgment to fulfill their statutory mandates in good faith, not to pursue their own independent policy agendas or the political objectives of the incumbent administration. 17. U.S. CONST. art. II, See JEREMY BENTHAM, A FRAGMENT ON GOVERNMENT AND AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES AND MORALS OF LEGISLATION 430 (W. Harrison ed., 1948) (1789) (distinguishing conduct rules from decision rules); Meir Dan-Cohen, Decision Rules and Conduct Rules: On Acoustic Separation in Criminal Law, 97 HARV. L. REV. 625, 628 (1983) (same). 19. See Evan J. Criddle, Mending Holes in the Rule of (Administrative) Law, 104 NW. U. L. REV (2010); Evan J. Criddle, Fiduciary Administration: Rethinking Popular Representation in Agency Rulemaking, 88 TEXAS L. REV. 441 (2010) [hereinafter Criddle, Fiduciary Administration]; Evan J. Criddle, Fiduciary Foundations of Administrative Law, 54 UCLA L. REV. 117 (2006).

6 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 329 I In recent years, legal scholars have devoted increasing attention to the law and practice of agency statutory interpretation. 20 Much of the resulting literature explores differences between the respective institutional roles of judges and federal agencies. 21 Professor Saiger s recent article, in contrast, emphasizes an important point of commonality between judicial and agency statutory interpretation: both judges and agency heads 22 are legally and ethically obligated to obey the Constitution and conform to the laws. 23 An agency s duty to obey the law cannot be less demanding within Chevron s zone of reasonableness, Professor Saiger argues, just because it knows that it will not face judicial review. 24 Rather, an agency must always act within its best assessment of its legislatively granted powers. 25 Accordingly, when agencies confront statutory ambiguity, they should embrace the interpretation that they believe best captures a statute s meaning. Professor Saiger does not dispute that reasonable minds may disagree about the best interpretive methodology for discerning the meaning of ambiguous statutory directives (e.g., textualism, purposivism). 26 Nonetheless, he argues that debates over statutory interpretation methodology should not obscure the fundamental principle that an agency bears an ethical duty to hew to the 20. See, e.g., William N. Eskridge Jr., Expanding Chevron s Domain: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of the Relative Competence of Courts and Agencies to Interpret Statutes, 2013 WIS. L. REV. 411; Elizabeth V. Foote, Statutory Interpretation or Public Administration: How Chevron Misconceives the Function of Agencies and Why It Matters, 59 ADMIN. L. REV. 673 (2007); Jerry L. Mashaw, Norms, Practices, and the Paradox of Deference: A Preliminary Inquiry into Agency Statutory Interpretation, 57 ADMIN. L. REV. 501 (2005); Pierce, supra note 5; Kevin M. Stack, Purposivism in the Executive Branch: How Agencies Interpret Statutes, 109 NW. U. L. REV. 871 (2015); Peter L. Strauss, When the Judge Is Not the Primary Official with Responsibility to Read: Agency Interpretation and the Problem of Legislative History, 66 CHI. KENT L. REV. 321 (1990); Christopher J. Walker, Inside Agency Statutory Interpretation, 67 STAN. L. REV. 999 (2015); Christopher J. Walker, Legislating in the Shadows, 165 U. PA. L. REV. (forthcoming). 21. See, e.g., Eskridge, supra note 20; Foote, supra note Professor Saiger uses the terms agency and agency head interchangeably, in recognition of the fact that the officials who lead an agency are ultimately responsible for directing agency statutory interpretation. See Saiger, supra note 8, at Id. at 1247; see also 5 U.S.C (2012) (requiring agency officials to swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States... ; bear true faith and allegiance to the same;... and... well and faithfully discharge the duties of [their] office ); 28 U.S.C. 453 (2012) (requiring federal judges to swear an oath to faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me... under the Constitution and laws of the United States ). 24. Saiger, supra note 8, at Id. 26. See id. at 1255 ( Agencies can interpret statutes in good faith using a variety of methodologies. ).

7 330 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 interpretation that the agency itself determines, in good faith, to be the best interpretation, rather than simply selecting any of several readings that the statutory text can plausibly bear. 27 This effort to rein in agency statutory interpretation is motivated by important practical, conceptual, and normative concerns. Practically speaking, Professor Saiger worries that Chevron deference has emboldened the executive branch to test the limits of judicial tolerance, common sense, and the rule of law by endorsing adventurous statutory interpretations that reflect the incumbent administration s views on optimal policy rather than the agency s best understanding of the statute s actual meaning. 28 Notably, Professor Saiger s article arrives at a moment when political conservatives have accused the Obama Administration of launching sweeping policy initiatives without plausible congressional approval, including purportedly unilateral executive action on gun control and deferred immigration enforcement. 29 Professor Saiger appears to share critics concerns that these measures reflect shoddy statutory interpretation. In particular, he laments that the Obama Administration reportedly formulated its controversial gun control and immigration policies first and only later scour[ed] existing legislation to find some implausible but not crazy legal hook for [its] actions. 30 He suggests that this approach to statutory interpretation is unethical, because it does not reflect a good faith effort to treat statutory interpretation as an interpretive activity that respects the principle of legislative supremacy. 31 Although Professor Saiger focuses on initiatives that have rankled political conservatives, his critique of the Obama Administration s approach to statutory interpretation transcends partisan ideology. Liberals have raised similar concerns about the Administration s aggressive interpretation of Congress s post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force ( AUMF ). 32 Although the 27. Id. 28. Id. at 1267 (quoting E. Donald Elliott, Chevron Matters: How the Chevron Doctrine Redefined the Roles of Congress, Courts and Agencies in Environmental Law, 16 VILL. ENVTL. L.J. 1, 3 (2005)). 29. See id. at (citing, inter alia, Robert J. Delahunty & John C. Yoo, Dream On: The Obama Administration's Nonenforcement of Immigration Laws, the DREAM Act, and the Take Care Clause, 91 TEX. L. REV. 781, 784 (2013); David Bernstein, Obama: Scrub Existing Legal Authorities to Take Executive Action on Guns?, VOLOKH CONSPIRACY (Jan. 1, 2016), [ 30. Id. at 1268 (quoting Bernstein, supra note 29). 31. Id. at Publ. L. No , 115 Stat. 224 (2001).

8 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 331 AUMF speaks only of military action against nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the [9/11] terrorist attacks... or harbored such organizations or persons, the White House has interpreted the text as a virtual blank check to conduct counter-terrorism operations against groups and individuals who pose a threat to the United States, irrespective of whether these targets played a role in the 9/11 attacks. 33 Liberal dissatisfaction with aggressive agency statutory interpretation will undoubtedly increase in the future as the incoming Trump Administration abandons established agency statutory interpretations dealing with topics such as climate change, immigration, and health care. Indeed, President- Elect Trump has already attracted criticism for his clumsy effort to find an implausible but not crazy statutory basis to compel Mexico to pay for the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico Border. 34 As Professor Saiger astutely observes, Chevron deference and the culture of executive branch activism that it has inspired may be partly to blame for such measures, because it has emboldened agencies to pursue result-oriented interpretations that do not actually reflect their best judgments about the meaning of a statutory text. 35 At a more conceptual level, Professor Saiger s article challenges the conventional wisdom that statutory ambiguities reflect an express or implicit delegation of policymaking authority to agencies. Here, Professor Saiger wages an uphill battle: not only does his thesis 33. See, e.g., Rebecca Ingber, Co-Belligerency, 42 YALE J. INT L L. (forthcoming 2017) ( [A]s things stand today, the public can only discover that we are at war with a particular group not because Congress declares it, not because the Executive declares it, not even because the group attacks us, but rather because we attack them. ); Greg Miller & Karen DeYoung, In Syria, Obama Stretches Legal and Policy Constraints He Created for Counterterrorism, WASH. POST (Sept. 23, 2014), and-policy-constraints-he-created-for-counterterrorism/2014/09/23/79fdaf e4-9a15-137aa _story.html [ (noting Senator Tim Kaine s concern that allowing the White House to use the AUMF as a legal basis for military action against the Islamic State in Syria would set a horrible precedent ). 34. See Memo Explains How Donald Trump Plans To Pay for Border Wall, WASH. POST., [ Trump has proposed, inter alia, that the executive branch reinterpret the USA Patriot Act to prevent undocumented workers from sending money remittances to Mexico until the Mexican government relents and agrees to pay for a border wall. For a critique of this proposal s legal coherence, see Stephen Heifetz & Kaitlin Cassel, Trump s Mexico Remittance Proposal Goes Inexplicably Awry, STEPTOE INT L COMPLIANCE BLOG (Apr. 15, 2016), [ 35. Saiger, supra note 8, at 1255, Professor Saiger argues that jurists may disagree about what statutory interpretation methodology is actually best from a legal point of view, while still accepting that agencies bear an ethical obligation to adopt the interpretation that they believe is best according to their own favored methodology. Id. at 1255.

9 332 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 challenge the views of many prominent legal scholars, 36 but it also flies in the face of the Supreme Court s own formal justification for Chevron deference. According to the Court, Chevron is premised on the idea that ambiguities in statutes within an agency s jurisdiction to administer are delegations of authority to the agency to fill the statutory gap in reasonable fashion. 37 When Congress commits an ambiguous federal statute to an agency s administration, it expressly or implicitly authorizes the agency to fill in the missing details according to the agency s own view of wise policy. Judicial deference to agency statutory interpretation is appropriate, the Court has explained, because filling gaps in statutes involves difficult policy choices that agencies are better equipped to make than courts. 38 This justification for Chevron is vulnerable to the criticism that it improperly characterizes all uncertainties in statutory interpretation as gaps. To better appreciate the inadequacy of this gap metaphor, consider the following scenario, as described by the Tenth Circuit: Buried deep in our immigration laws lie... two provisions: 8 U.S.C. 1255(i)(2)(A) and 1182(a)(9)(C)(i)(I). Enacted first, 8 U.S.C. 1255(i) grants the Attorney General discretion to adjust the status of those who have entered the country illegally and afford them lawful residency. But growing concerns about illegal immigration eventually induced Congress to enact 1182(a), which appears to take away at least part of the discretion 1255(i) gives. Among other things, [it] provides that certain persons who have entered the country illegally more than once are categorically prohibited from winning lawful residency here that is, unless they first serve a ten-year waiting period outside our borders. 39 Recognizing that the relationship between these facially contradictory provisions was unclear, the Tenth Circuit concluded in De Niz Robles v. Lynch that the agency was free to choose either of two reasonable interpretations: it could hold that 1182(a) eliminated the Attorney General s discretionary power to adjust status for covered individuals, or it could conclude that 1182(a) preserved the Attorney General s status-adjustment power. 40 The court justified deference to 36. See, e.g., Pierce, supra note 5 (asserting that within Chevron s zone of reasonableness, agencies are free to engage in a policy-making process ). 37. Nat l Cable & Telecomms. Ass n v. Brand X Internet Servs., 545 U.S. 967, 980 (2005); see also United States v. Home Concrete & Supply, LLC, 132 S. Ct. 1836, 1843 (2012) ( Chevron and later cases find in unambiguous language a clear sign that Congress did not delegate gap-filling authority to an agency; and they find in ambiguous language at least a presumptive indication that Congress did delegate that gap-filling authority. ); FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U.S. 120, 159 (2000) (characterizing Chevron as an implicit delegation from Congress to the agency to fill in the statutory gaps ); Pierce, supra note 5, at 982 ( Chevron s premise is that it is for agencies, not courts, to fill statutory gaps. ). 38. Brand X, 545 U.S. at De Niz Robles v. Lynch, 803 F.3d 1165, 1167 (10th Cir. 2015). 40. See id. at (discussing Padilla-Caldera v. Holder, 637 F.3d 1140, 1153 (10th Cir. 2011)).

10 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 333 the agency based on the idea that the facial conflict between 1255(i) and 1182(a) reflected a gap that the agency could exploit to further its independent policy preferences: [T]o reach Chevron step two the agency must first establish that traditional tools of statutory interpretation fail to reveal what the law has always meant. At that point the agency avowedly and self-consciously exploits the law s ambiguity and exercises its delegated policy-making authority to write a new rule of general applicability according to its vision of the law as it should be.... [C]ourts defer to the agency s new view because the agency has been authorized to fill gaps in statutory law with its own policy judgments. 41 This gap-filling rationale for Chevron deference does not ring true as applied to the question presented in De Niz Robles. To be sure, Congress may have expected the agency (not the courts) to take the leading role in clarifying the ambiguous relationship between 1255(i) and 1182(a). 42 But the apparent conflict between these provisions is not the type of statutory silence that one would ordinarily characterize as a gap. Nor does it seem likely that Congress would have expected the agency avowedly and self-consciously to exploit the facial conflict between these provisions in order to advance its own policy judgments or vision of the law as it should be. 43 After all, the entire purpose of 1182(a) was to reduce the Attorney General s discretionary power; the only uncertainty was how much power Congress had actually withdrawn. Granted, even in this context Congress likely would have expected the agency to take the lead in resolving the facial contradiction between the two provisions. But it defies common sense to suggest, as the Tenth Circuit does, that Congress would have given the agency carte blanche to resolve the issue based on policy considerations that were alien to the legislative priorities embodied in the relevant statutory provisions. Professor Saiger would likely argue that the Tenth Circuit s error runs deeper than simply mischaracterizing the agency s statutory interpretation as gap-filing or misconstruing Congress s expectations. In his view, the heart of the case against unfettered agency statutory interpretation is normative and structural: because agencies are, formally speaking, pure creatures of their statutes without inherent 41. Id. at Recent empirical studies offer some support for the idea that Congress consciously legislates against the backdrop of Chevron deference. See, e.g., Abbe L. Gluck & Lisa Schultz Bressman, Agency Statutory Interpretation from the Inside An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation and the Canons: Part I, 65 STAN. L. REV. 901 (2013); Lisa Schultz Bressman & Abbe L. Gluck, Agency Statutory Interpretation from the Inside An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation and the Canons: Part II, 66 STAN. L. REV. 725 (2014). 43. De Niz Robles, 803 F.3d at 1173.

11 334 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 constitutional authority, 44 they must be able to trace every exercise of administrative authority to a statutory source. 45 Accordingly, Professor Saiger concludes that when an agency does not seek to discern and apply a statute s best interpretation in good faith, its interpretations however reasonable on their face are ultra vires. 46 Agencies must therefore resist the seductive idea that statutory ambiguity authorizes agencies to chase any policy agenda they can reasonably square with the statute. 47 There are at least two potential weaknesses in this line of argument. The first is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Even if it were true that an agency s authority is constituted exclusively by statute, it is possible that an agency still might not bear a legal or ethical obligation to pursue the best interpretation of a statute rather than pursue the interpretation that best accords with their own views of wise policy. After all, Chevron embraces the idea that statutory gaps and ambiguities reflect delegations of discretionary power to agencies, and these delegations could very well include authorization to fill gaps with extraneous policy considerations. If at least some statutes do contain gaps that cannot be erased in a mechanical fashion using traditional tools of statutory interpretation, it is unclear under Professor Saiger s theory why the task of filling these gaps should be conceptualized as an exercise in interpretation rather than policymaking. To establish that agencies bear an obligation to interpret the statute when they operate within Chevron s zone of agency discretion, Professor Saiger must first demonstrate that the Supreme Court has it wrong: there is no such thing as a statutory gap, because all questions of statutory interpretation can be resolved through legal interpretation. Professor Saiger doesn t explain, however, why we should believe that statutory gaps are chimerical. A second weakness in Professor Saiger s argument is that it does not fully account for the President s independent constitutional authority. 48 Recall that the Supreme Court in Chevron opined that 44. Saiger, supra note 8, at See id. at (arguing that because legal grants of power, and legal restrictions upon that power, must be understood as prior to the exercise of the power they delineate, agency statutory interpretation likewise should be intellectually prior to extrinsic policy considerations). 46. Id. at Id. at See, e.g., Jack Goldsmith & John F. Manning, The President s Completion Power, 115 YALE L.J. 2280, 2282 (2006) (arguing that the executive branch has inherent power to prescribe incidental details needed to carry into execution a legislative scheme, even in the absence of any congressional authorization to compete that theme ).

12 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 335 judicial deference to agency statutory interpretation was appropriate, in part, because an agency to which Congress has delegated policymaking responsibilities may, within the limits of that delegation, properly rely upon the incumbent administration s views of wise policy to inform its judgments. 49 When an agency bases its statutory interpretations on the President s considered policy preferences, the interpretations arguably draw their authority not only from the statutory text itself, but also from the President s independent Article II power. 50 Some legal scholars believe that this link to the President is sufficient to justify agencies basing their statutory interpretations on policy considerations that lack a clear basis in the statute itself. 51 Professor Saiger appears to take the position that an agency may not rely upon the President s independent constitutional authority as a basis for grafting executive policy preferences onto statutes, because this is foreclosed by the principle of legislative supremacy 52 : both the President and federal agencies are bound by the terms of validly enacted statutes. Once again, however, Professor Saiger s argument is missing a crucial step. Federal statutes trump executive policymaking only if they expressly or implicitly address the question at hand. If a statute does not actually resolve the relevant issue, but instead merely delegates the issue s resolution to an administering agency (as the Supreme Court traditionally presumes under Chevron), there is no true conflict between the principle of legislative supremacy and the idea that an agency may pursue the President s views of wise policy. Consequently, neither the statutory basis of agency authority nor the principle of legislative supremacy are sufficient to ground a general obligation for agencies to seek the best interpretation of an ambiguous statute. What Professor Saiger needs to complete his argument is a robust justification for the idea that statutes impose legal obligations that channel and constrain agency interpretation even when Chevron deference applies, because the specific provisions under review are capable of sustaining more than one reasonable interpretation. 49. Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, 467 U.S. 837, 865 (1984). 50. See id. at ( While agencies are not directly accountable to the people, the Chief Executive is, and it is entirely appropriate for this political branch of the Government to make such policy choices resolving the competing interests which Congress itself either inadvertently did not resolve, or intentionally left to be resolved by the agency charged with the administration of the statute in light of everyday realities. ). 51. See Goldsmith & Manning, supra note 48, at (arguing that the executive branch s inherent completion power can explain the Chevron doctrine). 52. Saiger, supra note 8, at 1247.

13 336 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 Fortunately, Professor Kevin Stack has supplied the missing link in an illuminating article on agency statutory interpretation. 53 Professor Stack argues that the modern nondelegation doctrine has important implications for statutory interpretation in the administrative state. By requiring Congress to supply a statutory intelligible principle whenever it delegates authority to agencies, the nondelegation doctrine guarantees that federal agencies are never consigned to craft regulatory policy in a policy vacuum; instead, they always have statutory principles or policy considerations that govern their exercise of discretionary authority. 54 As a result, even when a statutory provision can sustain multiple reasonable interpretations, the nondelegation doctrine ensures that statutes provide at least general guidance to inform an agency s choice between these alternatives. 55 Professor Stack uses these observations to buttress the popular idea that agencies should employ a purposive approach to statutory interpretation. 56 Professor Saiger resists this conclusion, arguing that Professor Stack falls short of justifying purposivist interpretation as the best sort of interpretation, because agencies could conceivably adopt a textualist interpretive methodology without acting illegally or unethically. 57 Although I am personally persuaded by Professor Stack s argument, we need not choose sides in this debate to embrace Professor Stack s deeper insight that the intelligible principle requirement formally precludes Congress from conferring unconfined and vagrant discretion on agencies. 58 To the extent that the Constitution requires Congress to embed intelligible principles in regulatory statutes, both textualists and purposivists should be able to accept that the principle of legislative supremacy requires agencies to respect these principles as authoritative guidance when addressing statutory ambiguities, silences, contradictions, and other puzzles. For this reason alone, the idea that agencies may turn to the incumbent administration s views of wise policy rather than seeking in good faith to apply a statute s 53. Stack, supra note Id. at (citing, inter alia, Whitman v. Am. Trucking Ass ns, 531 U.S. 457 (2001)). 55. Significantly, Stack s insight that the intelligible principle requirement constrains statutory delegations applies equally to statutes that delegate authority directly to the President, see, e.g., Panama Ref. Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388 (1935), so the fact that an agency may follow White House policy direction when interpreting statutes cannot cure an otherwise standardless delegation, cf. American Trucking, 531 U.S. at (holding that an agency may not cure a standardless delegation by designing its own intelligible principle). 56. Stack, supra note 20, at Saiger, supra note 8, at A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 551 (1935) (Cardozo, J., concurring).

14 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 337 intelligible principle is antithetical to bedrock constitutional principles. 59 Ultimately, therefore, Professor Saiger is right to argue that agencies may not treat Chevron deference as a reservoir of unregulated discretion that they may exploit however they wish. Although Chevron prevents courts from challenging agencies reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes, this does not mean that statutory ambiguities present a blank slate on which agencies may inscribe their own independent policy preferences. The nondelegation doctrine prohibits Congress from delegating unfettered lawmaking authority through ambiguous or incomplete legislative drafting. To satisfy constitutional scrutiny, every legislative delegation must be accompanied by an intelligible principle capable of guiding an agency s exercise of discretion at every phase of statutory interpretation. Agencies bear a concomitant obligation to exercise their interpretive authority in a manner that is conscientiously focused on faithfully execut[ing] their statutory mandates. 60 As a result, an agency s obligation to interpret and discharge its mandate in good faith is not merely a question of administrative ethics or best practices; it is a constitutional requirement. II Thus far, I have argued that constitutional principles require federal agencies to interpret ambiguous statutory provisions in accordance with Congress s intelligible principle rather than resort to their own independent policy preferences or the incumbent administration s political agenda. In this Part, I take up Professor Saiger s invitation to consider more fully what ethical selfunderstanding an agency should have when it selects an interpretation within Chevron s zone of discretion. 61 Professor Saiger argues that we should conceptualize federal agencies as assignees 62 of interpretive authority that must give force to the meaning it understands the statute to have. 63 A federal agency must therefore focus on 59. If Chevron were based on the premise that agencies may fill in gaps based on policy judgments made by the agency rather than Congress, there would be merit to Justice Clarence Thomas s concern that Chevron raises serious constitutional questions. See Michigan v. EPA, 135 S. Ct. 2699, 2712, 2713 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring). 60. U.S. CONST. art. II, Saiger, supra note 8, at Id. at Id. at 1274.

15 338 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 interpretation rather than policymaking. 64 In the discussion that follows, I seek to unsettle this understanding of an agency s institutional role. I argue that when agencies administer ambiguous statutes, they are necessarily forced to make discretionary normative judgments that entail recourse to policy considerations. Nonetheless, the discretionary character of agency statutory construction does not exempt agencies from the legal requirement to discharge their purposive statutory mandates in good faith. This legal conduct rule remains in full force, displacing extraneous policy considerations, when agency statutory constructions qualify for Chevron deference. Professor Saiger s conception of agencies as assignees of interpretive power rests on the premise that statutory administration can be divided into two modes: interpretation and policymaking. Agency statutory interpretation is consistent with the principle of legislative supremacy, he argues, but independent agency policymaking is not. 65 Legal scholars have come to recognize, however, that there is a third mode of agency administration statutory construction that occupies an intermediate position between pure interpretation and pure policymaking. In contrast to statutory interpretation, which seeks to identify the linguistic meaning of an authoritative legal text, statutory construction draws on legal norms embedded in the statutory text and the broader legal system to discern the legal meaning of the text s semantic content as applied to particular cases. 66 Statutory construction does not entail free-form policymaking, because it is subject to textual and normative constraints. Nonetheless, statutory construction is an inescapably juris-generative activity, because the decision maker exercises discretionary judgment to construct the statute s legal meaning through a creative process that integrates the relevant textual and normative considerations into a coherent account of the statute s legal import. Professor Michael Herz has argued that this distinction between statutory interpretation and construction maps tidily onto Chevron. 67 In his view, statutory interpretation corresponds to Chevron s step 64. Id. at See id. at 1237 ( Legislative supremacy and fidelity to the statute, rather than good policy, should be the agency s moral lodestar. ). 66. Lawrence B. Solum, The Interpretation-Construction Distinction, 27 CONST. COMMENT. 95, 100, 103 (2010); see generally KEITH E. WHITTINGTON, CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION: DIVIDED POWERS AND CONSTITUTIONAL MEANING (1999); Jack M. Balkin, The New Originalism and the Uses of History, 82 FORDHAM L. REV. 641 (2013); Randy E. Barnett, Interpretation and Construction, 34 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL Y 65 (2011). 67. Michael Herz, Chevron Is Dead; Long Live Chevron, 115 COLUM. L. REV. 1867, 1895 (2015). As Professor Herz observes, however, courts tend to use the terms interpretation and construction interchangeably when applying Chevron. Id. at 1892.

16 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 339 one, where courts employ traditional tools of statutory interpretation examining language, purpose, and legislative history to identify a statute s linguistic meaning. Once a court determines at step one that a statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, 68 however, [i]nterpretation... forsakes us and the court withdraws to allow the agency to take the lead in statutory construction. 69 The role of courts at Chevron step two, therefore, is simply to ensure that an agency s chosen construction is reasonable or permissible 70 (i.e., that it is not premised on interpretations that are inconsistent with a statute s semantic meaning). Thus, Professor Herz suggests that Chevron s two steps correspond neatly with statutory interpretation and construction. 71 This argument is not convincing. To accept this account, we would have to conclude that courts exhaust the task of statutory interpretation at Chevron steps one and two, then pass the baton to agencies to conduct statutory construction. But this is plainly not how Chevron works. Step one does not entrust statutory interpretation solely to the courts: when courts encounter semantic ambiguities in a statute, Chevron counsels that they should defer to an agency s reasonable efforts to clarify the statute s linguistic meaning based, in part, on its expertise in the relevant field. Nor do courts limit their review under Chevron to the semantic meaning of a statute. Instead, they routinely consider substantive norms, such as constitutional concerns, at step one to determining whether agency statutory constructions are consistent with the text s clear and unambiguous legal meaning. 72 Moreover, when normative considerations suggest that 68. Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, 467 U.S. 837, 843 (1984). 69. Herz, supra note 67, at 1895 (quoting FRANCIS LIEBER, LEGAL AND POLITICAL HERMENEUTICS: PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION AND CONSTRUCTION IN LAW AND POLITICS, WITH REMARKS ON PRECEDENTS AND AUTHORITIES 111 (William G. Hammond ed., 3d ed. 1880)). 70. Chevron, 467 U.S. at Herz, supra note 67, at 1896 (quoting Lawrence B. Solum, Originalism and Constitutional Construction, 82 FORDHAM L. REV. 453, (2013)); see also Jeffrey Pojanowski, After Deference, 81 MO. L. REV. (forthcoming 2017) ( If there is too large a linguistic leap from the interpreted text to the rule itself, a reviewing court will find that the agency made law rather than interpreted it. ). 72. See Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Construction Trades Council, 485 U.S. 568 (1988) ( [W]here an otherwise acceptable construction of a statute would raise serious constitutional problems, the Court will construe the statute to avoid such problems unless such construction is plainly contrary to the intent of Congress. ); Solum, supra note 66, at 113 (observing that so-called substantive canons are clear examples of canons of construction ); Cass R. Sunstein, Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, 103 HARV. L. REV. 405, 459 (1989) ( Interpretive principles are often a product of constitutional norms. ); Jonathan D. Urick, Note, Chevron and Constitutional Doubt, 99 VAND. L. REV. 375 (2013) (arguing that the constitutional avoidance doctrine is a mandatory not merely prudential limit on agency statutory interpretation).

17 340 VAND. L. REV. EN BANC [Vol. 69:325 an agency has adopted an unreasonable construction of the statute, courts do not hesitate to set aside the construction at Chevron step two even if the construction is plausibly within the range of linguistic meanings that the statutory text can bear. 73 Thus, Chevron s two steps clearly are not designed to separate statutory interpretation from statutory construction. Nonetheless, understanding the interpretation/construction distinction helps to clarify how agencies should understand the nature of their own role in statutory administration. When agencies administer statutes, their task is not merely to discern the semantic meaning of statutory provisions through interpretation but also to translate that semantic meaning into legal meaning through statutory construction. When the issue before an agency is a choice between different understandings of a statute s semantic meaning, an agency bears a duty to choose the best interpretation. Other questions, however, call for statutory construction. For example, a statute s semantic content may be vague rather than ambiguous, 74 forcing the administering agency to draw distinctions that cannot be derived mechanically from the linguistic meaning of the statutory text. Or a statute may contain facially contradictory provisions that cannot be reconciled solely through textual analysis of the statute s semantic content (e.g., De Niz Robles). Statutory silences also call for construction, because they supply no text to interpret. 75 In each of these contexts, a statute s legal meaning must be constructed by synthesizing the text s linguistic meaning with legal norms that find expression in the Constitution, the statute, and other relevant sources of law. This is the task of statutory construction, not interpretation. The distinction between statutory interpretation and statutory construction complicates the story Professor Saiger wants to tell (i.e., that agencies should pursue a statute s meaning without reliance on policy, adherence to a political agenda, or considerations of the public good). 76 As Professor Lawrence Solum has observed, statutory construction unlike statutory interpretation is a normative enterprise that necessarily draws on legal norms that are rarely made explicit in a statute s text: The correctness of an interpretation does not depend on our normative theories about what the law should be. But construction is not like interpretation in this regard the production of legal rules cannot be value neutral because we cannot tell whether a 73. See, e.g., Republican Nat l Cmt. v. FEC, 76 F.3d 400 (D.C. Cir. 1996). 74. Id. at (discussing the distinction between vagueness and ambiguity). 75. See Solum, supra note 66, at (discussing vagueness, contradictions, and silences as examples of contexts that call for construction). 76. Saiger, supra note 8, at 1274.

18 2016] CONSTITUTION OF INTERPRETATION 341 construction is correct or incorrect without resort to legal norms. And legal norms, themselves, can only be justified by some kind of normative argument. 77 Consequently, statutory construction is not simply an effort to recover a textual meaning that exists as an objective fact that is intellectually prior to the act of construction. 78 Instead, statutory construction constitutes statutory meaning through an act of juris-generative judgment that draws on normative considerations. 79 Once the interpretation/construction distinction comes clearly into view, we can better make sense of Chevron s suggestion that statutory ambiguities and gaps reflect delegations to administrative agencies. 80 Chevron rests on the premise that when Congress entrusts an agency with responsibility to administer a statute, it also entrusts the agency with primary responsibility to resolve linguistic ambiguities in the statute, selecting what it believes in good faith to be the best reading of the text from among the various plausible semantic meanings. Once the agency has identified a statute s linguistic meaning, Chevron contemplates that the agency will also take the lead in statutory construction, determining the appropriate legal ramifications of the statute s linguistic meaning in light of relevant normative considerations. Unlike statutory interpretation, the task of statutory construction does invite agencies to fill statutory gaps, specify the application of vaguely worded provisions, and resolve apparent contradictions by drawing on policy concerns and considerations of the public good. When agencies administer statutes, their role is not merely to avoid error in discerning a statute s linguistic meaning but to exercise discretion in constructing the statute s legal meaning from the applicable legal considerations. Thus, normative judgment is part and parcel of agency statutory construction. Nonetheless, the fact that agency statutory construction invites recourse to normative considerations does not mean that agencies have free rein to indulge their own idiosyncratic policy preferences or political agendas. Statutory construction, like statutory interpretation, is subject to binding legal norms that constrain how agencies may define a statute s legal meaning. 81 In particular, agency statutory construction is governed by two types of norms: (1) regime-specific norms specified by Congress and (2) trans-substantive norms that address broader systemic concerns. These two categories of norms apply 77. See Solum, supra note 66, at Saiger, supra note 8, at Solum, supra note 66, at Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, 467 U.S. 837, (1984). 81. See Barnett, supra note 66, at 69 (discussing decision rules for statutory construction).